#made because i didnt know if there are any modern/working completed maps

[bythelightswitch]

hmmm i might as well post this here. in april something happened to my brain and i decided i was going to recreate all of yoglabs. pro tip dont do this its fuckin hugeeee so much more than you think in your head. anyway idk if ill ever get to finishing it since i got so burnt out but im proud of what i did anyway

[wanna1things]

Ha Sungwoon; The First Day of Christmas | 11 Days of Christmas ❄

Genre;; fluff + CHRISTMASSSYYYYY

Warnings;; nada this is pure fluff

Pairing;; Ha Sungwoon x reader

Summary;; Someone is sending you gifts that seem like… a modern version of the 12 days of Christmas?

Style;; bullet point

Word Count;; 947

The 11 Days of Christmas;; 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th | 10th | 11th (coming soon) -MASTERLIST-

Lmao im sorry i didnt post this at 12 gmt because i got back home late from the hospital so i couldnt write;;; but!! Is done now its kind of short because i was super sleepy when i wrote this sorry if theres any mistakes lol im currently living off of 2 hours sleep and an americano ? if its terrible i’ll come back and fix it...

ever since you left home you lived in an apartment complex near the middle of the city

you knew everyone there; daniel and his cats, jaehwan and his laugh, ong and the weird thing he did with his ears

but your favourite neighbour had to be sungwoon

he’d always be doing something… weird… like singing karaoke at 3am

but if you were awake he’d drop you a text and invite you over

he was so fun to be around that yes!!! you ended up having a crush on him

so when christmas time came around you planned to confess to him on christmas day or something shdjfs

but when you opened your door on the 15th of september, at 10am, a present was outside

a note on it read “open this now!! don’t wait until christmas day!!”

you picked it up and took it back into your apartment

when you opened it, inside was a packet of doritos

Uh… okay?

attached to the doritos was another note

“Read this in tune please;;; on the first day of christmas i gave to my true love… a packet of doritos… love from your secret admirer”

genuinely... what does this mean

you decided you’d put the doritos to use because hey who turns down free doritos?? so you invited sungwoon over to play videogames

when he saw the doritos on your kitchen counter he started smiling like a complete idiot

tbh you just put it down to him liking doritos so you gave him the whole packet

and then you sat down to play MARIOKART UHHH YES

while he chose the next map you finished the packet of doritos

“Sungwoon,, i have a secret admirer!??”

sungwoon burst out laughing and you smacked him on the shoulder like lmao rude?

“how do you know that, y/n???”

you pointed over at the empty box that once held the doritos and sungwoon smirked, pressing to start the next game

you didn’t have a chance to question him further because you focused on winning the games lmao (which you did well done)

not long after you finish playing games, and sungwoon went back to his apartment, you laid down on your sofa and contemplated who the hell was your secret admirer

of course you hoped it was sungwoon but… although he was weird would he really give you doritos as a present??

while you racked your brain you ended up… falling asleep

the next day you were woken up by your doorbell at exactly 10am

you just moved to turn over but ended up falling off the sofa lmao

when you finally got to the door after about 10 minutes trying to get off the floor

there was yet another box in front of your door

you brought it inside again and set it down on your table and left to go to work

when you got back sungwoon was riGHT OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR

when you appeared behind him he turned around and smiled widely at you

“Oh hey y/n, i came to see if you got another present today??”

“uh... yeah. I haven’t opened it yet so you can come and open it with me if you want?”

Sungwoon shook his head and went back into his own flat

you were confused to say the least but you went inside your flat and headed straight for the box

inside were 2 packets of instant noodles… and more doritos?

“on the second day of christmas i gave to my true love 2 ramen cups and a packet of doritos! Love from your secret admirer”

ok. Now you really want to know who this is

first doritos and now ramen cups? You weren’t about to deny that you were going to use the instant noodles but like what kind of presents are these they aren’t even like one dollar

so you made a plan

the ‘secret admirer’ seemed to be coming at 10am, or at least they did on the last 2 days

so all you had to do was open the door at 10am and bam, you’d catch them in the act lol

you set about 1000 alarms to make you wake up because well tomorrow was your day off

and you planned to lie in wait, looking out through the like eye hole thing of your door until the secret admirer appeared

to be honest you slept through the first like 5 alarms

but when 10am rolled around you were in your place, you saw something completely unexpected

a wild sungwoon appeared and placed an open box in front of you door, chucked a packet of doritos in and 2 packets of ramen… and then got in it himself??

as soon as he closed the box you swung the door open and opened the box

“SUNGWOON WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THAT BOX??”

“Listen i can’t afford to buy you a packet of doritos, 2 packets of ramen AND more stuff for 11 whole days i wanted to get it over and done with”

while he’s splurting all this out you’re just trying to comprehend what this means like okay uh

is sungwoon… the weird secret admirer????

“so... on the third day of christmas, i gave to my true love… myself???”

OH

OH OKAY

“the present has been accepted. but there’s not 3 of you so it doesn’t count… i’m going to need 2 other things...”

at this sungwoon smirked and walked towards you, smiling widely before placing his lips against yours

he pulled back and smiled again, whispering

“One… and-”

and again he pressed his lips against yours

“There’s two. Happy now?”

and of course, you were more than happy

ok now im going to sleep got a 9am tomorrow and then UNIVERSITY OVER for 2017 :~)

[bloojayoolie]

Being Alone, Animals, and Apparently: >Hey guys, I wanna run a game Sure, guy, that sounds good. Let's go for that. Youve played in a few games, I'm sure you can handle running something >It's going to be my own custom setting, based on d20 modern Oh god, how is this going to turn out? >It's based on a book I've been writing since I was a teenager Oh boy, this is gonna be amazing >Post-apocalyptic future of the area we live in A standard take, but a classic one >Players are all equipped with Pipboys which operate as radios, inventories, and watches Oh boy! >Characters have energy bars that fill and deplete as they use their powers Oh boy! >Monster Energy drink is a energy-replacing item so important it serves as a major feature of the setting Oh boy! >Players pick an animal, a weapon, and an "element" and can transform into an anthropomorphic elemental animal form that gains extra powers and uses their weapon for super-damage Oh boy! >DM doesnt know how many core features of d20 in general work Oh boy >DM doesn't know the geography of the area we live in Oh boy! >DM doesn't know particular facts of reality Oh boy! >DM has a DMPC who the story is about who is the most powerful of the animal/elemental/weapon people Oh boy! >Much of the DMPC's plot revolves around a romance with the stand-in for the DM's dead ex fiancee Oh boy! >The DMPC's love interest dies tragically Oh boy One player dropped out within an hour of showing up the first day. The rest of us held on for a shocking number of weeks just so we'd have something to fill time with, and some place to go have pizza and hang out for a bit, and to have stories And oh. I have stories. The "elements" alone were... staggering. "Legends d20 Fallout: Mighty Morphin' That Guy Rangers >That Guy ran a game based on his post-apocalyptic tragic romantic autobiographical work in progress novel about people in the future using magic fallout watches to turn into animals Quoted By: *46403659 46403704 >4640397846404111 >>46404256 I've told this story a few times, but basically, this guy sets out to make a game based on the epic sci fi novel called Legends" he's been writing, based on his life, only set in the distant future. He uses d20 modern to do so. He had none of the books, never played the system, and didn't know how anything worked In addition to our regular hit points we had rolled, he saddled us with 150 extra HP. Why? Because he didn't know how damage worked. So, for example his main character (based on him, of course) had a sword that did 1d100 damage per hit. No strength bonus, no multiple attacks, just 1d100 d have characters who had d100s as their damage die. In fact, There's other fun stuff about the "combat system" I can go into later, but I wanna touch on the core concept of the game for a moment. It's ye olde post-apocalypse, after what is basically the Second Impact, a meteor made out of monsters and evil crashes into earth and reformats it into crazy world. The game takes place in the region we live in, which was kinda a neat concept to start with, but then it got out of hand because of none of us much geography Every player picks an animal, an "element", and a weapon, and those become our spirit animal/element/weapon. I was an ice wolf with katars, my friend was a darkness panther with a sword, and our other friend was an electromagnetic pteradactyl with a pair of berettas, at which point you might begin to see why I put "element" in quotation marks, because the magic system and cosmology were all over the map Quoted By >>46403692 46403978 >46404111 >>46430662 46403615 Here's some of the elements we were informed of or encountered: Ice Fire, Wind, Water 티ectricity. Plants. Poison. Darkness but not shadow Sunlight, Electromagnetism Nuclear Power, Acid Mental Healing, and I believe Drugs was one as well. I bring up darkness/shadow because, as I said, one of the party members was a darkness character, who could control shadows and use them to freeze people in place and so on and suchlike. However, the enemies were living shadows.. and he had no control or effect on them. Because darkness is different from shadow Anyways, we spent about two and a half, maybe three months of sundays playing games with this guy, halfway because the concept was so gonzo and he was such a pushover as a DM that we could basically justify doing any completely retarded thing we wanted, partly we had nothing better to do and felt bad for him, and partly it was fun to hang out and eat pizza and (as time went by) watch movies rather than play the game. I haven't really touched on the plot yet. We're locals in this post-apocalptic future, me a farmer and the other guy a raider (the third player, the pteradactyl guy, bailed out half an hour into the first session quite gracefully and never ever returned), and we go t this magical academy where, it is implied, we will somehow learn how to use our powers This is in fact a vicious lie The "magical academy is in fact a lawless hell-hive run by loosely disguised versions of the DM and his former fiancee (I say Versions because there were two characters with the same name as him) that was instantly and irrevocably termed "the mexican prison every time we mentioned it. "Lessons" consisted of us agreeing that our characters did nothing rational or interesting for 6 months at a time and we'd gain random stat bonuses or special powers that were either more or less game breaking than our current powers Quoted By 46403719 46403978 46404111 46403659 Between these wastes of time, we'd go do other time wasting things like chase a dragon only to have Version A of him come slay it, or scavenge for pristine cans of Monster Energy Drink around the remains of the cities. Which brings me, in a round-a-bout way, to the matter of the "combat system" You see, as I mentioned, he's never played d20 modern, played what seems to be very little D&D, and had apparently decided to hijack what Im told is some JRPG's combat system for his "homebrew. We're given energy bars, and every time we use one of our special moves the bar gets depleted. And our special moves are quite special. We can still use normal attacks, or we can use his totally awesome "combo attack", where if we get a 15-20 on the d20 roll, we deal an additional 1d4 damage! Or, we can use a "power attack" and, if we get a 19 or 20, automatically deal double damage, amazing! He actually wrote the word "power attack" down in his notes, then told us to it, and didn't understand when we seemed taken aback. In addition to these wonderful options, we also get some magic super abilities, like beam attacks or choking people with their darkness, or other things like that, which range between useless, already covered by abilities in the game, or completely broken. I had an ability where l'd shoot a super ice beam at someone with my katars, and get +d12 to damage for every chunk of my energy bar I depleted in the process, and that's where the Monster Energy Drink comes in because a single can of Monster Energy can be drunk as a free action and completely refill your energy bar And thus I became an ice drill Quoted By: *46403799 *46403978 »>46404111 46403692 I've sadly forgotten some of our funnier moments in the game, but others will never leave me. Like when our "ally", a poison T-Rex with a sniper rifle, kept shooting us in combat because the DM didn't understand what a "miss" means. Eventually we collapsed the Tacoma dome on him, us, and the enemy and that seemed to work out Oh, and all rope was referred to as "fuckin' rope" for no clear reason. All our items resided in our pip boys, by the way. Which was his exact description of them, no less You know how you can cause an explosion by filling a room with flour and then igniting it? It's a bit exotic of a trap, but it's something you can do. I told him about that once and from then on it became a valid combat tactic. In open-air areas. As a standard action Man, my mind's just boiling as I remember some of the other things. Eventually he decided +150 hit points was too many and brought it down to +89. We met a few people who he told us did 1d1000 as damage, but we never saw this in action Quoted By: >46403978 46404111 46404725 >>46406650 46403719 There was a fighting tournament that used DBZ rules, which the panther exploited by winning 4 fights via ringout. For you see, because all these people do 1d20 or 1d30 (he had a d30) damage, with maybe some extra dice for flavor, as damage, none of them had strength scores. So the easiest way to beat them, without having to carve through their 500 hit points using a sword? Bullrush. And the DM didnt know what it was or that it sted The panther dude took Agile Riposte and used the 25 dex granted to him by the DM being a moron and fighting defensively to take Attacks of Opportunity mpletely carve up enemies by exploiting the fact the DM doesn't know how often you can s the fast hero and I ended up with less dexterity due to the DM's incompetence. In return, I mocked the concept relentlessly. Whenever my character transformed from human to furry mode, I would do a power rangers henshin sequence "Blue Wolf POWER!" I also promised my next character would be a water crab with a sledgehammer for his weapon, so l could call myself "MC Hammer" and do the hammer dance, on account of being a crab. But it wasn't to be Two sessions in a row, we showed up and played nothing. We sat with the DM and watched then early-days Netflix for a bit, maybe had some pizza, discussed what we might do in the game next week, left after a half hour or so, came back next week, did it again, left again, and the week after that the DM simply didn't invite us over. The Legend of Legends ended as it began: With unbearable disappointment and confusion And that's the story of the worst game I ever played

[viralhottopics]

RIP Wii U: Nintendo’s glorious, quirky failure

Nintendo has ceased production of Wii U less than five years after its launch. What went wrong, and what will be its legacy?

In late January it was announced that Nintendo had ceased production of the Wii U console. The follow-up machine to the hugely successful Wii had sold fewer than 15m units worldwide since its launch in 2012. PlayStation 4 sold more in a year. Wii sold more than 100m in its lifetime.

What happened? How did Nintendo, one of the oldest and most respected companies in the video game industry, get it so wrong? And did anything good come out of the Wii U era? How will the machine be remembered, if at all?

Certainly, some believe the console was cursed from the start right from the first announcement at the 2011 E3 video game conference in Los Angeles. Before that, Nintendo had made vague references to Project Cafe, a new piece of hardware deep in development at the companys famed R&D labs, but the nature of the device was unclear. The E3 presentation was supposed to be the big reveal.

Then, there it was at the Nintendo press conference, in front of the whole games industry. Wii U. Reggie-Fils-Aim, head of Nintendo America, gave an obtuse introduction and showed the unique GamePad controller, with its built-in display. After this, came a showreel of gaming moments, then nothing. The crowd whooped, but when the lights went down, a few expressed confusion: was the Wii U GamePad an extension to the original Wii? Was it an entirely new console? That evening, in an interview with the Evening Standard, the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stated: Because we put so much emphasis on the controller, there appeared to be some misunderstanding.

The PS4 and Xbox One, high-powered machines arrived and changed the gaming landscape. Composite: Xbox One S v PS 4 Pro v PS4 Slim v Project Scorpio

A masterpiece of understatement. In some ways, that misunderstanding never went away. Even when it became clear that Wii U was a whole new console, with a unique motion-sensitive screen pad, consumers were nonplussed. There had been rumours that, with its custom AMD 7 series graphics chipset and IBM multicore central processor, the machine would be more powerful than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 especially as it was arriving years after those machines debuted. But before the launch, developers were already whispering to news sources that this was not the case driving the second-screen would eat up the graphics processing power and the CPU wasnt that special. It was all academic anyway: barely a year later, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One arrived to completely change the technological landscape.

But Nintendo wasnt competing with PlayStation and Xbox, and never really had. Instead, it needed to convert the tens of millions of Wii owners whod rarely bought consoles before; whod been seduced by the Wii Remote controller and the immediate, social experience it promised. Those people were now quietly migrating to other platforms: smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes … Thats who the Wii U was aimed at.

In the months following E3, it was at least picking up interest from the development community. I had done work on the N64, Gameboy, GameCube and Wii and I still maintain they were my favourite systems to work on, so when the WiiU was announced it had me excited, says Byron Atkinson-Jones of Xiotex Studios I wanted to see how far we could go in game design terms with the two screen setup. Were we going to get new game paradigms like we did with the Wii and its controllers?

However, even before the launch, the games media was complaining about a lack of compelling first-party content. The machine would arrive with only two major Nintendo titles, the mini-game collection Nintendo Land, and New Super Mario Bros U, a decent side-scrolling platformer, but by no means a major Mario title with with little involvement from Miyamoto. There were intriguing moments: Nintendo Land has the clever asymmetrical multiplayer action of Luigis Ghost Mansion and the boisterous arena-battler Animal Crossing: Sweet Day. But there was also nothing as immediately compelling as Wii Sports or Wii Play nothing that completely crystallised the idea of the GamePad.

Veteran developer Rhodri Broadbent once worked for Q-Games in Japan, and met Shigeru Miyamoto while making Star Fox Command. He felt there should still have been a role for the Wii Remote in the new era. The fact that Wii U did not come bundled with a Wii Remote was really disappointing to me, he says. I felt that the identity of the Wii Remote was worth continuing, and that combining the jump to HD visuals with the jump to HD motion control of the Wii Remote Plus would have been a smart play. In terms of marketing, the Wii Remote was iconic from the get-go, whereas the GamePad sadly didnt really get to find its identity in either software, nor marketing. There were some truly excellent, best-in-class games released for Wii U, but very few of them gave life or character to the GamePad.

The GamePad, as a unique selling point, was also a unique curse, an albatross around the neck of the whole project. Designers struggled over its multifaceted nature: should they support it as a standalone screen, a second-screen for the TV, or as a device to allow asymmetrical multiplayer experiences (the player with the GamePad is able to have a different experiences to others using Wii Remotes). It was a tough business proposition too. Games publishers like to be able to transition their projects freely between different machines most modern game engines are platform agnostic making this process easier. But Wii Us controller demanded a different approach, so including the console on multiplatform projects was complicated and expensive even if they were just going to use the GamePad as a mini-map, which many did.

Of the third-party games available at launch, most were quick conversions of familiar PlayStation and Xbox titles: Call of Duty, Batman, Fifa… few of these exploited the GamePad feature-set in truly innovative ways. The best was perhaps ZombiU, a fascinating survival horror title with a neat permadeath mechanic, set in a post-apocalyptic London that made inspired use of the GamePad as both an environment scanner and a cellphone. With its tense, gory action, it also brilliantly subverted expectations of a Nintendo launch title. But it wasnt enough.

The problem is, mainstream game development is all about confidence. Console manufacturers have to be certain that third-party publishers will support the device; third-party publishers have to be sure that consumers will buy it, and draw confidence from first-party titles; and consumers wont commit until they know there will be great titles from both first- and third-party studios. Its a vicious circle of reliance, and it often all depends on that launch week. Nintendo just didnt come up with the goods to inspire consumers, and because of this, the likes of Activision, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft were all backing off right from the outset.

Meanwhile, Nintendo was trying to make things easier for independent developers, noticing the huge influx of excellent indie titles on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. After the success of the 3DS eShop in attracting experimental games, the company set out to improve its digital store for the home console experience. However, its legacy was not good. On the Wii, support for smaller studios was patchy: the submissions process was, according to some studios, extremely lengthy, and there were sales thresholds that made it risky to commit to offbeat projects. Even after these problems had been addressed, Wii U had no support for the important multi-platform games engine Unity until much later in the consoles lifespan, strangling its potential with the indie community.

[The Wii U dev kit] was clunky and far more difficult to setup than its predecessors, says Atkinson-Jones. I remember opening the box it came in and there was a warning saying it was very easy to brick the machine so getting it setup was a terrifying prospect. Id love to say I got further than this but the reality is that even though Nintendo had signed So Hungry to appear on WiiU, Unity would not actually be ready for another year its because of this my other game Blast Em! came about and thankfully that game has kept my studio running. Once you got past all the problems of setup and getting a working build of Unity, it was just that much harder than doing any kind of cross platform work – the big difference being the two displays of course.

Nintendos Wii and revolutionary remote. Photograph: Andrew Parsons/PA

So the Wii U had a lot to contend with: a poorly conceived debut, a unique selling point that was difficult to describe, and a hesitant development community unwilling to commit resources to a quirky machine. But it did provide moments of genuine brilliance. The defining first-party titles Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Bros, Splatoon and Pikmin 3 may not have been top tier Nintendo originals (theres no Miyamoto Mario, no new Zelda), but they were excellent games, filled with interesting ideas and classic moments of design genius.

Pikmin 3 is one of the greatest games I have ever played on any system, says Broadbent. Its mission mode is so tightly balanced, with so many tricks and techniques to optimise battles, find new routes and shave seconds off your time that I can and often did replay the same mission for entire days without noticing that the my weekend had disappeared. Im a big fan of the oft-overlooked, but to my mind never bettered, New Super Mario Bros U, especially the challenge modes. And keeping with Mario, Super Mario Makers musical, whimsical user interface is a masterclass in hiding complexity and infusing character into menus the way the sound effects harmonise with the background music as you place objects on the screen is endlessly charming to me.

There were beautiful third-party games too, sparsely spread out though the machines lifespan perhaps, but certainly there. Cult Japanese studio PlatinumGames, best known for its demanding brawlers, was an unexpected hero producing two masterpieces for the machine: the extravagant Bayonetta 2, and the kookie super hero puzzler, Wonderful 101. Warner Bros brought us the excellent Armored edition of Batman Arkham City, but also the ludicrously overlooked Lego City Undercover, a hilarious Grand Theft Auto pastiche, which is now rightfully being remade for current consoles.

More importantly however, there were indie developers who truly embraced the idiosyncracies of the system and its development environment. We enjoy letting the quirks of specific hardware inspire new ideas and features here, so from a design point of view, Wii U was a lot of fun, says Broadbent. Gyros, a camera, a touch screen there was a lot there to use. For Scram Kitty, I had the idea of making the titular cat appear as a sort of sports commentator on the TV while the player focused on the GamePad action, and although in the end that element didnt turn out to be an essential feature of the game, it was a great source of personality for the game, and one which kept throwing up new ideas throughout development.

Highlights included DrinkBox Studios crazed platformer Guacamelee!: Super Turbo Championship Edition, the lovely retro platformer Shantae and the Pirates Curse, and the intriguing puzzler Art of Balance. Most were multiplatform, but lots used the Wii U capabilities in interesting ways. A key example was the engrossing Affordable Space Adventures from Danish developer KnapNok Games. In this interstellar puzzle game, the GamePad was used to monitor and interact with your crafts primary systems, including engines, anti-gravity controls and scanner, providing a great Star Trek bridge experience.

There were also thoughtful conversions of iOS titles, including Dakko Dakkos translation of the spooky narrative adventure Year Walk. We took a much more all-in approach to the machines feature set, combining the gyros, touch screen, separate displays, and even subtly altering the audio between the gamepad and the TV, to create very satisfying controls and puzzles, says Broadbent. The end result feels uniquely suited to Wii U.

Its also worth remembering Nintendos unique attempts to create friendly online communities around the Wii U. The Miiverse is a family-friendly social network in which players can chat about what theyre playing, draw and share pictures, and seek gaming advice, all within a safe, charming environment populated with customised Mii characters. It was a much more warm, human approach to networked play than Xbox Live or PlayStation Network and, as Jennifer Schneidereit, co-creator of luscious historical adventure Tengami discovered, it allowed unique relationships between developers and players:

It was possible to post to Tengamis Miiverse from within the game, to show level progress or ask other players for help, she says. As a developer I was able to interact with people in Tengamis Miiverse and help with puzzles, answer their questions and listen to their feedback. Because Miiverse posts are not only textual, players can also hand draw and incorporate stamps, it was a real delight to watch players using our stamps to create artwork of their own.

Wii U had a difficult start, with a difficult idea in a difficult era. The E3 presentation blurred what the machine actually was, and the GamePad was never an easy proposition to market unlike the Wii Remote that people could see was fun, just from the adverts. Meanwhile, with Xbox and PlayStation continuing their graphics arms race, and competition coming in from smartphones and tablets, the gaming audience seemed to be stratifying into two groups: the sorts of players who bought consoles and high-end PCs, and the sorts whod quite as happily play Candy Crush Saga for free on their phones. The idea of a console as the central focus of a party or family event, which had peaked between 2005 and 2010 with both the Wii and the rise of music games like Guitar Hero, had drifted out of favour.

Nintendos Shigeru Miyamoto. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Now here comes the Nintendo Switch, a regeneration of the Wii U concept where the GamePad effectively becomes the console, with its own built-in controllers. If anything, it is a more flagrant attempt to seduce casual players away from their phones, while tapping into the family living-room appeal of the original Wii. Broadbent sees Switch as a reconnection with that machine: Im very happy that the joy-cons have so many little tricks in them, and encouraged to see games like ARMS push forward higher-fidelity motion controls right out the gate. But Im mostly happy that Switchs identity as a home console thats not tied to your TV is being communicated so clearly.

Communication, it seems, is key. The Wii did its own communicating: you just watched people playing Tennis or Bowling and you knew it was fun. Nothing Nintendo has done with its hardware since then has been quite so alluring. But to write off Wii U as a creative failure would be a gross disservice. The GamePad actualised a lot of vague entertainment industry hype about the second screen, and lots of games truly illustrated the magic of the concept. And lets not forget that Wii U also saw Nintendos entry into the toys to life market with its Amiibo characters little figurines that could be placed on the screen to interact with games. They sold over 40m of those.

In years to come, people will pick up the console second-hand, with a few games Super Mario 3D World, Bayonetta 2, Mario Kart 8 and theyll realise what it was that Nintendo had in mind, theyll understand the appeal of the hardware. Much too late, of course.

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